1. Field of Invention
This invention is directed to systems and methods for bookmarking live and/or recorded multimedia documents or multimedia streams.
2. Description of Related Art
Various forms of remote interaction with multimedia streams are known. Technologies associated with distance learning or video conferencing allow large numbers of users to view a multimedia presentation in real time, or asynchronously, from remote locations while taking notes or marking important portions of the multimedia stream. Digital multimedia recordings of meetings, seminars and classes are becoming more widely available. Systems and methods for taking notes with respect to various sorts of multimedia recordings using laptops, pen-based and/or tablet type notebook computers, personal digital assistants and the like, have been developed. The NOTELOOK™ and LITEMINUTES™ products, by Fuji Xerox Company, Limited, are examples of such systems and methods. The NOTELOOK™ system is described in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 6,452,615, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Further, various ways of annotating interesting points in a meeting or other video stream have been devised to use various devices, such as described above, keytags or wireless telephones. These annotations are generally time-stamped and/or associated with video streams for browsing through the video streams and/or for retrieving specific portions of the video streams.
Another emerging practice in meetings, seminars, classes and other events is the use of digital cameras to take pictures of presentation slides, whiteboard notations and the people attending the event. While digital cameras can be convenient, the results produced by commemorating an event in this fashion are not ideal because a user has limited positions and angles available to take the pictures. Furthermore, at any particular moment, the user can only take one picture. Often, it is desirable to have multiple pictures from different perspectives at any particular moment, as well as pictures of the presentation slides.
Souvenir i-Recall™ is a web-based application for personal digital assistance and laptops. The Souvenir i-Recall™ product permits the creation of text notes correlated to a multimedia stream. Bookmarks created by Souvenir i-Recall™ do not include images or multimedia snapshots.
The eMarker™ by Sony is a device similar to a keytag that permits a user to mark a song heard on the radio. The user uploads the marks to a server and the marks provide links to information about or related to the content being played on the radio at the time the mark was made.
Minneman et al., “A confederation of tools for capturing and accessing collaborative activity,” Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia '95 Conference (1995), incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, describes a system in which a single switch is used to create indexes into a captured meeting. Moran et al., “I'll get that off the audio: A case study of salvaging multimedia meeting records,” Proceedings of CHI '97 (1997), incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, also describes applications for indexing captured meetings.
Chiu et al., “Taking notes in meetings with digital video and ink,” Proceedings of ACM Multimedia '99 (1999), and U.S. Pat. No. 6,452,615, both of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety, disclose a system for notetaking with digital and ink. In Chiu et al., images can be snapped into note pages and correlated with a video steam of a meeting. Users can snap an image or a sequence of images into a note page for annotation with digital ink. Multiple images annotated with digital ink can be incorporated into a note page, but each image and annotation has a different time stamp.
Abowd et al., “Teaching and Learning as Multimedia Authoring: The Classroom 2000 Project,” Proceedings of the ACM Multimedia '96 Conference (1996), incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses an application for indexing a captured meeting using a personal digital assistant. Abowd requires that slide images be preloaded into the personal digital assistant. Other standalone note taking systems that time stamp notes and correlate the notes to audio video are also known. See, for example, Lamming et al., “Activity-based information technology and support of personal memory,” (Proc. Information Processing '92) (1992), Whittaker et al., “Filochat: handwritten notes provide access to recorded conversations,” Proceedings of CHI '94 (1994), “Dynomite: A Dynamically Organized Ink and Audio Notebook,” Proceedings of CHI '97 (1997) and Chiu et al., “An Internet-based system for multimedia minutes,” Proceedings of Tenth World Wide Web Conference (2001), all of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety.
Davis et al., “NotePals: Lightweight note sharing by the group, for the group.,” Proceedings of the CHI '99 Conference (1999), incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, describes notetaking on personal digital assistance and subsequently uploading the notes to a server.